New AMD Socket: AM1 (aka FS1b)

[Dirk Broer]

There's a new type of AMD socket on the horizon, but not for the traditional type APUs and CPUs.
We already had socket FS1, a CPU socket that is implemented in notebook platforms from AMD with its APU processors codenamed Llano, Trinity and Richland,
be it that the FS1 APUs only have 722 pins instead of 904/905 as compared to their full-blown desktop brothers.

And, just as socket FM2 was followed by socket FM2+, socket FS1 is followed by....socket FS1b, renamed as socket AM1

What's in it for you? Those of us with interest in the low-power socket FT1 (BGA-413) AMD Z (<5 Watt), C (9 Watt) or E-Series (18 Watt) can now look out to more powerfull solutions,
as the CPUs/APUs that are to be used are from the Kabini family -the same that goes into socket FT3 (BGA-769)- with the advantage that they are not soldered on the mobo.

Gigabyte has the first (commercially available) offerings, where the GA-AM1M-S2P is specially targeted at legacy -See the LPT1 port? I miss the floppy connector though- support :
and
but Asrock, Asus, Biostar, ECS and MSI are reported to have boards ready too.

The CPUs that I can find at CPU-World for this socket have a tdp of 25 Watt though (but quad core at that for both AMD Athlon 5150 and 5350 and Sempron 3850 and dual-core for the Sempron 2650)
so the 2GHz A6-5350 is expected to be as powerful as his FT3 brothers GX-420CA and A6-5200.

The prices for the new CPUs are expected to be around $50 and the same seems to hold true for the boards. This could mean a cheap crunching solution for our 24/7/365 multi-rig crunchers, aka farmers....
And it doesn't take much room either, boards are mini-ITx or micro-ATX.

Features for the new platform with their targeted CPUs:

• MMX instructions
• SSE / Streaming SIMD Extensions
• SSE2 / Streaming SIMD Extensions 2
• SSE3 / Streaming SIMD Extensions 3
• SSSE3 / Supplemental Streaming SIMD Extensions 3
• SSE4a
• SSE4 / SSE4.1 + SSE4.2 / Streaming SIMD Extensions 4
• AES / Advanced Encryption Standard instructions
• AVX / Advanced Vector Extensions
• BMI1 / Bit Manipulation instructions 1
• F16C / 16-bit Floating-Point conversion instructions
• F16C / 16-bit Floating-Point conversion instructions
• AMD64 / AMD 64-bit technology
• VT / Virtualization technology

That's a lot of F16C / 16-bit Floating-Point conversion instructions....for such a tiny APU, pardon: SOC.



What does the present top-model have, feature-wise? In other words: what do we miss?

• MMX instructions
• SSE / Streaming SIMD Extensions
• SSE2 / Streaming SIMD Extensions 2
• SSE3 / Streaming SIMD Extensions 3
• SSSE3 / Supplemental Streaming SIMD Extensions 3
• SSE4a
• SSE4 / SSE4.1 + SSE4.2 / Streaming SIMD Extensions 4
• AES / Advanced Encryption Standard instructions
• ABM / Advanced Bit Manipulation
• AVX / Advanced Vector Extensions
• BMI1 / Bit Manipulation instructions 1
• F16C / 16-bit Floating-Point conversion instructions
• FMA3 / 3-operand Fused Multiply-Add instructions
• FMA4 / 4-operand Fused Multiply-Add instructions
• TBM / Trailing Bit Manipulation instructions
• XOP / eXtended Operations instructions
• AMD64 / AMD 64-bit technology
• VT / Virtualization technology
• EVP / Enhanced Virus Protection
• Turbo Core 3.0 technology

Main competitor for this new AMD hardware platform is the Intel Bay Trail platform with as most powerful CPU at present seeming to be the 10 Watt 2.41 GHz Intel Pentium J2900